Friday Dec 19, 2014

If you want to know how much CPU, memory, or other resources your application has used, you can pre-load a library and define a .fini method that prints out the results. You can also take advantage of the getusage call, which provides some information about CPU time and processes. But more information is available. Darryl provides examples of how to use these two components plus others that fill in the details.

Profiling is critical to improving application performance. Without profiling, it is very easy to guess where the application is spending cycles, and then expend effort optimizing code that has little effect on overall performance. Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4 provides an overview screen designed to focus you on the metrics with the most promise. Darryl Gove walks you through the overview screen and explains what it indicates about your application.

The new options in Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4 provide much finer-grained control over debug information, which allows you to choose how much information is provided and reduce the amount of disk space needed for the executable. Ivan enumerates the options and provides examples of how to use them.

About the Photograph

I took the picture of the 01 Ducati 748S this summer, in Colorado. It currently has about 1300 miles on the odometer.

Wednesday Jul 31, 2013

We've been emphasizing the benefits of using Oracle Linux with
Ksplice
rebootless updates several times already. The ability to
minimize downtime when applying rebootless patches to the Linux
Kernel is a feature unique to Oracle Linux, and a growing number of
customers realize the benefits of this technology.

But did you know that we use Ksplice for diagnostic purposes, too?
As part of our Oracle
Linux Premier Support offering, we can make use
Ksplice to enable additional debugging functionality on your production
system, if we need to track down an issue in your environment. Instead
of asking you to reboot into a custom Linux kernel that contains
additional debugging code, we now simply create a custom Ksplice patch
that helps us to gather the required information, while your system
keeps running. Once we've obtained the necessary details, you can
simply remove the debug patch with Ksplice at runtime again, without
any interruption. The additional debugging information helps our
support team to determine the root cause of your issue. In case it
turns out to be a genuine bug in the Linux kernel, we will then develop
and provide a bug fix for this particular problem in the form of a new
Ksplice patch, which you can apply while the system keeps humming
along. Bug analyzed and fixed, no reboot was required!

To learn more about his feature and the other advantages of Ksplice,
take a look at Wim's recent blog post
"The
Ksplice differentiator".